Paid calling advertising, which is also referred to as pay-per-call advertising or cost-per-call advertising, is a system of advertising that allows advertisers to generate, track, and compensate pay-per-call providers and publishers for leads received through phone calls. In pay-per-call advertising the advertiser pays a fee for each call connecting the consumer to the advertiser. Click-to-call is a form of paid calling advertising in which a person clicks an object, such as a button, image, advertisement, or text, to initiate a telephone call. Click-to-call requests are most commonly made on websites but can also be initiated by hyperlinks placed in email, blogs, flash animations or video, and other Internet-based objects or user interfaces. Click-to-call functionality is now extended to web-enabled mobile phones enabling a user to connect by clicking the phone number link, without having to dial the number manually. Web-enabled mobile phones and their inherent click-to-call and search functionality are also contributing to the substantial growth of the pay-per-call model.
Advertisers employ pay-per-call providers or networks in pay-per-call advertising to drive calls via advertisements to their company representatives, or to their interactive voice response (IVR) systems. Pay-per-call providers work with advertisers to create advertisements for products and/or services, which the pay-per-call providers publish directly, or distribute to publishers that publish the advertisements via pay-per-call campaigns. The use of publishers is beneficial and commonplace because it provides widespread advertisement distribution.
Pay-per-call providers have hundreds and in some cases thousands of publishers with web content they want to monetize. As a result, pay-per-call providers are hubs for advertisers. In pay-per-call campaigns, publishers select advertisement phone numbers and place advertisements on behalf of pay-per-call providers that consumers see, such as on their mobile phones. When a consumer places a call, such as by “clicking” on the advertisement, a phone call is generated, such as from a mobile phone, to the advertisement phone number, and the consumer is then transferred via call forwarding a target phone number of the advertiser. Calls can be automatically forwarded to the advertisers or sent to a call center where potential prospects are qualified before being passed along to advertisers. Call tracking, a key part of the technology that enables the pay-per-call model, is the ability to track calls to allow pay-per-call providers to account for results, and to reward publishers for performance, on a revenue-share basis.
In pay-per-call advertising, advertisers normally do not want to compete with publishers for traffic generated with their brands or trademarks, and do not want traffic generated by the use of other companies' brands or trademarks because to do so causes customer confusion and trademark infringement issues. Furthermore, many advertisers employ pay-per-call networks to publish generic or non-branded advertisements to attract consumers that do not respond well to brand advertising. As a result, advertisers typically approve advertisements and their scope of distribution prior to advertisement publication to ensure the advertisements are compliant and meet their strict requirements.
Publishers generate their revenue through call generation via advertisements they publish through pay-per-call campaigns. As a result, some publishers, which are often referred to as rogue publishers, and even some unscrupulous advertisers, employ dishonest techniques to generate “click-through” calls in order to increase revenue. A “click-through” call is a call generated from an advertisement that goes to a different advertiser from the one the calling party intended to call. To generate a “click-through” call, a rogue publisher or dishonest advertiser will incorporate into an advertisement misleading advertising content designed to mislead a consumer into thinking that the advertisement relates to particular advertiser. However, when a call is made from such an advertisement, the call goes not to the advertiser the caller believed he/she was calling but to a different advertiser, which generates dishonestly-obtained revenue for the rogue publisher provides the advertiser the calling party reaches with the opportunity to harvest business away from the advertiser the calling party thought he/she was calling. There are several monitoring services that monitor and police trademark, keyword, and key phrase compliance of advertisements on the web based on criteria specified by advertisers. The monitoring service monitors advertisements found on designated search engines, and alerts advertisers of potentially trademark infringing or noncompliant advertisements. Although the major search engine outlets have rules against using trademarked terms illegally, enforcement is difficult and any trademark compliance monitoring and compliance enforcement is left to the advertisers or the pay-per-call providers. Although it a common and relatively simple process of monitoring trademark, keyword, and key phrase compliance in advertisements, there is a need in the art for a way to monitor advertisement compliance using the phone numbers listed in the advertisements to allow advertisers and pay-per-call providers to quickly isolate fraudulent or non-compliant advertisements, identify the publishers and advertisers of such fraudulent or non-compliant advertisements, and to take the necessary action to facilitate the removal or discontinuance of such fraudulent or non-compliant advertisements.